About

Award winning singer-songwriter, producer and musician Jona Lewie has had an illustrious career in the industry. From his early days playing piano with blues legend Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, through early chart success in 1972 with his self-penned Zydeco smash hit “Sea-Side Shuffle”; to his Ivor Novello winning Christmas Perennial hit “Stop The Cavalry”.

Indeed, Jona has had major chart successes internationally not only with “Cavalry”, but also with tracks such as “Louise”, “You Will Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties”, ” I Think I’ll Get My Haircut” amongst others. The majority of his hits will always be associated with his time signed to Stiff Records.

A major new BBC documentary series about the label has again brought wider public attention to Jona, his music and the infamy of the label. Coincidentally, his 2nd Top Of The Pop’s performance of “You Will Always Find Him In The Kitchen At Parties”, although now having been downed many times, was one of the most requested clips on an early YouTube channel, achieving (in 2007) more than 250,000 hits before being taken down for breach of copyright. The track continued to bob up and down ever since on many various YouTube channels, typically downed e.g. in 2010 after passing the 500,000 hits mark on each of 3 channels, and subsequently again on other channels that also no longer survive after passing 1 million and 2 million hits. Similarly ”Stop The Cavalry” appeared on two other YouTube channels, (called Roscoz and Terry Dactyl) and were both downed for breach of copyright after each reaching 3,00,000 and 4,000,000 hits respectively. With greater regulation of the internet, rights holders of Lewie’s tracks finally appear to be better protected.

More recently “You Will Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties” appeared in a nationwide successful TV campaign to promote IKEA that used the song and the recording and Jona himself who made a cameo appearance in the award-winning TV advertisement.

Jona has been post producing tracks on a new CD with a planned release for Autumn 2018. His rare live unplugged show already features material from the album plus his ever-familiar hits and rocky Blues tunes.

A “best of” compilation of his Stiff Records recordings is available from BMG, as is his first Stiff album “On The Other Hand There’s A Fist”, which has become something of a cult classic.